StumbleUpon.com just doesn’t get me any traffic. StumbleUpon.com is a waste of time.
If you’ve heard these complaints or have made them yourself, this article is definitely for you. I’ve been a “Member since Aug 06, 2007“and StumbleUpon.com (SU) has treated me really well. Here are a five specific keys to getting traffic with SU:
- Make friends with SU users who aren’t new to the SU scene. Find top stumblers who like things you like and add them to your subscriber list. Don’t just add all the top stumblers – see what they have in their favorites, compare it to what you plan to favorite, and make sure it’s a fairly reasonable “good fit”.
- Next Step: Get to know these people! How? – stumble posts they create, discover their stuff. BUT, don’t SPAM them. If I was a top stumbler and I got a ton of friend requests from newbies, I’d probably just ignore them until they got their feet wet a bit. StumbleUpon recently added this new function too, which makes it even easier to see how close you “match up” with other Stumblers:
- Socialize! This is what SU and all the other “social networks” are all about – socializing! Once you add friends with common interests, don’t be afraid to chat with them, send them a message via the SU message box, (here’s a quick view of the “Send a message” box)
ask them to Thumb Up and review something, etc. You’ll get no’s, ignored, and once in a great while one of them will actually do something to help you. This will probably happen more than you expect if you’re persistent and personalize your message.
- Don’t just book mark your own stuff! I know, to most of you this is a “no-brainer” but come on – if you just add your own stuff you will be tagged as a first class SPAMMER! Besides that, the “important” SUers will ignore everything you do and you may get banned from SU. To avoid this beginners mistake, find stuff you like that’s related to your website and add it to your favorites: become a part of your industries community! If you don’t know where to look, go to the SU search bar in the top right corner of the SU screen and type in one of the keywords that relates to your industry.
Don’t be too specific in your keyword search, and you’ll find other sites that will actually provide you with great stuff you can write about for your own blog.
- “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail!” Yep, that’s right, if you don’t have a social media marketing plan of attack, you’ll waste a lot of time and, just as the complaints at the top of this post say, SU (or any other social media site) won’t do anything for you.
If, after you implement this advice, you are still echoing the same sentiments found at the top of this post, you probably haven’t put each step in to practice fully 🙂 Happy Stumbling!
UPDATE!The Power of stumbleupon links. Out of curiosity, I decided to check on my placement for the keyword phrase “Stumbleupon strategies”. To my surprise, out of 1,430,000 websites, this article is number 7. Here’s the proof!